Page 29 of Dark Biker Protector

She squeezed my hand. And I knew what she was saying to me. It was the permission I had been waiting for to take the shot. I pressed the gun into his gut as he rounded on her, and, with one squeeze, buried a bullet into him.

Chapter Eighteen – Abbey

I watched with horror as he staggered backwards, his eyes suddenly blank and devoid of feeling. His hands groped for his torso, pressed against the wound in his stomach, trying to stem the flow of blood coursing from him.

The sound of the gunshot filled my ears. I knew it wouldn’t be long until the neighbors called the cops, and I wanted to be out of here by the time they arrived. Right now, though, all I could do was stare at Franco as he crashed over the couch, collapsing to the ground, a smear of blood on the ground below him.

Dead. He was dead. He was finally dead.

I burst into tears the moment I saw him there. Not grief, no – relief. Relief that it was finally over. After being tormented for so long, he was finally dead, and there was nothing that could change that. He would never be able to hurt me or any other woman again. Whatever lies he had tried to spin to me, he didn’t stand a chance of convincing me anymore.

For a moment, I had almost believed him. Hell, maybe it was more that I had wanted to believe him, than anything else – it wasn’t like I would actually have ever been able to trust that he meant the words coming out of his mouth, not after everything he had done to me, but I had wanted to believe that there was a chance he would make things right.

But he’d had that chance before he’d so much as met me. If he had really intended to fix himself, he could have done it long before we had encountered one another. He had no interest in changing himself, no – he was just searching for a way to get out of the situation he was currently presented with. He would have said anything if it meant surviving, walking out of here to torment another woman.

Chuck wrapped his arms around me, letting the gun fall to the ground and holding me close.

"Hey, hey, it’s alright," he told me, rocking me gently. "It’s okay. You’re safe. It’s over now."

I held on to him for dear life, clinging to him like he was the only thing keeping me pinned down to earth right now. It felt like everything I knew had been torn out from underneath me, all the horrors and hell that I had been through vanished in the moment the bullet had driven itself into Franco’s gut.

I had never seen a dead body before. I’d covered plenty of cases that had involved corpses, but being presented with one myself...it was something else entirely. I was trembling helplessly, my hands digging into Chuck’s sides, as though he alone could make this right.

He held me there for a long while, until I had gathered myself enough to take a breath. I wiped the tears from my eyes, and looked up at him.

"What happens now?" I asked him, and he cupped my chin in his hand.

"You and Cinnamon need to get out of here," he replied. "I’ll call up some of my guys to clean this place, get rid of Franco where nobody’s going to find him. You think anyone’s going to come looking for him?"

I shook my head.

"I don’t think so," I replied. All of his family had cut him off a long time ago...he never told me why, but I bet it was because of what he put those girls through. I couldn’t imagine any of them would be feeling particularly devastated about his loss...

His loss. Fuck, even just thinking that made my head spin. It was over. It was well and truly over. And this, really, had been the only way it was ever going to end with him. I knew the cops would never have taken me seriously; they would have just brushed me off the moment I came to them with any of the shit he’d been putting me through. No, I’d had to take matters into my own hands, and I was glad, at last, that it was done.

I grabbed Cinnamon, put him into a cat carrier, and balanced him on my lap as Chuck took me back across the city to his compound. I was sure I would be hearing from my landlord soon enough about everything that had happened, but right now, it was hard to give much of a damn about that. I was just beyond relieved that Franco was dealt with. I had thought I would feel some kind of guilt if something like this had happened to him, but to my surprise, it didn’t hit me like that. After all he had done, after all he had tortured me with, I didn’t feel like I’d had any other choice.

Chuck led me inside, and I released Cinnamon in his little apartment. The cat instantly ran off to hide under the bed, clearly still spooked by what had happened earlier.

"You think he’s going to be okay?" I fretted, and Chuck pulled me down on to the bed beside him.

"You should be worried about yourself right now," he replied. "You’ve been through so much, Abbey..."

"I’m okay," I replied, but, much to my chagrin, I felt tears dripping from my eyes. I guessed, with the shock of it all, it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the emotion hadn’t really hit me full-force yet. Cinnamon, sensing my tears, emerged from under the bed and jumped up into my lap. I smiled as I reached down to pet him – when Franco had kicked him like that, I had been so worried that he might have been hurt, but he was still okay, thank God.

"You’re not," he told me. "And that’s alright. You’ve never seen someone...shot before, right?"

I shook my head.

"Never," I admitted. "I...I can’t stop wondering if it was the right choice..."

He planted a kiss against my temple.

"It was the right thing to do," he promised me, his voice firm, leaving no room for argument or debate. "Trust me. A guy like that, he’s never going to stop. He’s always going to come after you, or someone else, some other woman. And the cops won’t do shit about it. They never do. You have to take matters into your own hands, do what you have to do to end it."

I stared at him for a moment. There it was again – him talking like he had experience with this, like he knew what he was talking about. I knew something had happened. And, after what I had just seen, after what I had just done, I felt as though I deserved to know the truth of it.

"Chuck," I murmured to him softly. "What...what went down with you?"

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